He sketched out the plans that night by moonlight as Miriam slept.
Clayton and two of his brothers-in-law broke ground on the project a week later, on an unseasonably warm autumn afternoon when Miriam was off shopping in town. Working together, the men managed to dig the holes and pour the concrete in under two hours. By the time she returned, Clayton was back inside the shop, working away on the Uptons’ clock and acting as if he’d been there the whole time.
Over the next few days he finished that clock, and it turned out beautifully. As was his custom, the final step was to carve his initials and the citation for his favorite Bible verse into the bottom, which he did now. After prepping the surface, he took out his favorite chisel and carefully etched into the wood his mark:
CR
Ecc 3:1
Pulling back to give it a look, he realized he was no longer alone. Miriam was standing nearby, watching him as he carved, mesmerized.
“You finished it,” she said, stepping forward to get a better look.
“Ya.” He traded the chisel for a jar of liquid and a fine-tipped brush, and then he carefully painted over the letters and numbers until they were covered fully in the sealant. “All done.”
“It’s perfect. Shall I pack it up and ship it in the morning?”
“Ya. If you can get it over to the post office first thing, it should arrive well in time for the Uptons’ anniversary.”
For a split-second, an odd expression crossed Miriam’s face, one Clayton could not read. But before he could ask if something was wrong, the store’s front door swung open, the bells chiming, and a small group of customers came inside.
Later that afternoon, Miriam slipped into a quiet mood that Clayton chalked up to exhaustion due to her condition. She looked pale and listless to him, and he realized she hadn’t eaten much the last few days. He wondered if that was normal for a woman in her sixth month of pregnancy.
At closing time he grabbed her by the hand and told her he wanted to show her something. He hadn’t been planning to reveal the gazebo to her until it was finished, but he needed something now, something big enough to snap her out of this somber, distracted mood. She came willingly but without much interest—until they rounded the corner and she saw the odd cement squares protruding from the ground.
“What’s going on here?” she asked, sounding perturbed that someone had messed up her favorite little picnic spot.
Clayton couldn’t suppress his grin. “It’s a surprise, something I decided to build for you—with a little help from the guys. We got this done the other day while you were off with your mamm. Now all we have to do is wait a few weeks for the concrete to cure, and then we can start framing it out.”
“Framing what out?” she asked, shaking her head. “What is it?”
“It’s a gazebo. I mean, it will be a gazebo when we’re done with it. And it’s yours, Miriam. It will be your special place. All yours.” He watched her face with equal parts anticipation and apprehension as she absorbed his announcement.
Miriam blinked. “A gazebo?” Her tone was impossible to gauge. Clayton had thoroughly surprised her, but he couldn’t tell if it was a good surprise.
“I know how much you liked the one at Brenda’s house. This one will be sort of like it. Not as fancy, of course, but sturdy and screened in, and perfect for sitting in and just being by yourself when you need to be.”
“By myself,” she said, not so much a question as an echo.
“Ya. Your special place won’t just be an old desk in the back room or up in a dusty old hayloft. It will be here. And it will be yours.”
She at last turned from the footings sticking out of the ground to look at him.
“You’re making this for me?”
“I am.”
A slight smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “You don’t have to go to all this trouble, Clayton. I know how much this spot means to you.”
He put both arms on her slim shoulders. “I want to do this for you, Miriam. I realize it doesn’t look like much now, and the concrete’s still wet, but when it’s built, it will—”
She silenced him with a gentle kiss to the cheek. “It’s the nicest thing. Really. Thank you, Clayton. I’m overwhelmed.” She looked down at the nearest footing. “It’s still wet, you say?”
He nodded, trying to ascertain if she was truly happy or not.
“Then you should put your mark in it, the same way you sign your clocks.”
Clayton stared down at the gray, malleable foundation. “But it’s not my gazebo. Why don’t you sign it instead?”
She turned to look at him again. “Can’t we share it? It should be our gazebo.”
Though she still hadn’t rewarded him with the exuberance he had hoped for, the fact that she wanted to share the gazebo with him lightened his heart.
“Then I suppose we’ll need a new mark. One that stands for the both of us.”
Miriam grabbed a nearby stick and knelt at one of the footings as together they decided what their mark might be. Once they had chosen, she wrote in the cement the letters MMCR for “Mr. and Mrs. Clayton Raber” and the citation for Mark 1:35, a Bible verse perfectly appropriate for a place of one’s own:
In the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.
The next morning, when Clayton came in from doing the chores, he learned from his mother that Miriam had gone on to work extra early. At first, he wondered if she was down at the gazebo site, already eager to spend time in that “solitary place,” just like the Bible verse said. But then he remembered a brief exchange between the two of them before falling asleep last night, something about her going in first thing to get the Uptons’ clock ready for shipping and him bringing the buggy down when he came later so she could head right on out to the post office as soon as he got there.
Sure enough, when he reached the shop at his usual time and stepped inside the back door, he spotted the box on the desk, wrapped and addressed and ready to go.
“I thought I heard you coming down the hill,” Miriam said as she came through the showroom doorway and retrieved her purse from the shelf. “Carry it for me?” she asked, gesturing toward the package.
“Sure.” Clayton set down his things, scooped up the box, and then carefully carted it out to the buggy, setting it on the floor inside.
Miriam seemed preoccupied as she walked around and climbed in from the other side, so he didn’t try to make conversation. Instead, he just unhitched the horse from the post, handed her the reins, and watched as she drove the buggy away.
Her odd mood seemed to linger even after she was back, and she was silent and distracted for much of the day. Clayton spent the afternoon on a complex clock repair, though as he worked his mind kept going back to a niggling, disturbing thought, one that had to do with that day last month when he’d come upon his wife in the back room writing a letter. She had said she was just working out her thoughts on the page, and yet, Clayton realized now, she had not shared those thoughts with him at any point since, nor had she given him the letter. Their kiss that day had been pure heaven, but looking back at it now, he had to wonder if his tentative trust had been misplaced.
As he finished his repair now, fixing the erratic rack and snail movement of a porcelain Waterbury clock, he decided he had waited long enough. He would ask her again about that letter, soon.
He waited until they were in bed that night, the lights extinguished and the two of them lying side by side. The covers were off and the windows were open to let in what small breeze might come to cool off the room. It took him a full ten minutes to summon the words.
“Miriam, remember last month when we were at work and I came into the back room and you were writing me a letter?” he whispered into the dark.
But she made no response.
He turned his head toward hers and could just make out the confines of her profile. Her eyes were closed, the rising and falling of her chest
slow and even.
“Miriam?”
No response. She was asleep.
Turning on his side, he prayed that God would show him how to let her know she could tell him anything—and that he would be able to hear whatever it was she found so hard to say.
Clayton wasn’t aware he drifted off, only that the next thing he knew, Miriam was calling for him in a dream. They were in the pasture between their houses, and she was screaming his name, over and over, but he couldn’t get to her. He looked down at his legs and saw that both were now disfigured lumps of scar tissue and mangled bone. He could not run to her. He couldn’t move—
“Clayton!”
He awoke to the sound of Miriam’s screams from down the hall.
He heaved himself out of bed, knocking over his bedside lamp as he struggled to find his footing. The glass chimney shattered, and broken bits skittered across the hardwood floor. He smelled spilled kerosene as he grabbed his flashlight from the dresser and stumbled toward the bedroom door.
Throwing it open and moving into the hall, he realized he was hearing his mother’s voice now as well, low and soothing as she tried to calm the still-screaming Miriam. Flipping on the flashlight, he hobbled forward through the shadowy hallway until he reached the open door of the bathroom. He came to a stop and directed the beam inside.
In the jerky half-light he saw Miriam doubled over on the bathroom floor, groaning in pain. His mother was kneeling beside her, and all around their folded knees was a growing puddle of blood.
Clayton had only been in an Englisch hospital one other time in his life, after the buggy accident, when a doctor with a hawk-like nose and a bushy moustache told his parents that he’d been able to save the leg, but it would never function normally again.
Now, as Clayton sat next to Miriam’s bed, holding her hand as she stared out the window at the soft light of dawn, the fear he had felt in this place as a child came flooding back to him.
The hospital was where you found out everything was different, but you didn’t know what that difference really meant, or how it would change your life. You didn’t know how it would change you, only that it would.
“What was it?” Miriam whispered now, her tone void of expression.
“Miriam,” Clayton whispered back, afraid to answer her.
“I want to know what it was.”
Clayton swallowed back the growing ache in his throat. “A girl.”
“Did you see her?”
Clayton had not asked to see the tiny stillborn child Miriam had been carrying. It had not occurred to him to ask. “No.”
“Where is she? What have they done with her?”
Clayton didn’t know. Was he supposed to know? “I’m not sure.”
Miriam’s eyes closed as tears pooled and then slid down her cheeks. A nurse came into the room to do a quick exam and told Clayton he could wait out in the hall.
He hesitated. The nurse’s timing couldn’t have been worse. “I don’t think I should leave her. Can’t it wait just a few minutes?”
The nurse opened her mouth to reply, but Miriam filled the space with an answer of her own.
“It’s okay, Clayton. I’d like some time to myself, anyway.”
He was startled. Alone? Now?
“Really,” she pressed. “You can go. And you don’t need to rush back.”
The request fell off her lips softly, but it felt like a load of bricks hurled at his heart. “Miriam?” he asked, certain she couldn’t possibly mean what she had said. She hadn’t even looked at him.
She just turned her head more fully toward the window.
The nurse smiled compassionately at him and nodded for him to leave.
“Aw, don’t take it out on him, honey,” he heard the woman say to Miriam as she pulled a curtain around the bed. “It’s not his fault. There’s nothing he could have done to save the child.”
Clayton hesitated, listening, but Miriam did not respond.
“Sometimes it just happens. I’ve been in this job a long while and I can tell you that you didn’t do anything wrong either. Trust me. You and your husband will be able to have many other children.”
Still Miriam said nothing in response. Clayton continued on into the hall, lost in thought. He knew what had happened was God’s will, but knowing it and believing it on the inside were two different things.
He hovered just outside the doorway for a while, wondering what he should do once the nurse was finished. More than anything, he wanted to go back into the room to be with his wife, but he also wanted to respect her wish to be alone. He was still waiting, still debating with himself, when Miriam’s mother came rushing down the hallway, her kapp strings flying behind her.
“Where’s my daughter?” Abigail demanded when she reached Clayton.
He nodded to Miriam’s room. “She’s in there, but the nurse is with her right now.”
She pushed past Clayton and went inside.
At least that answered his question. Miriam had wanted him to stay away so she could be alone, but as long as her mother was here, she wasn’t alone anyway. Once the nurse was done, he was definitely going back in.
From where he stood in the hall, Clayton could hear the murmur of the nurse talking to Abigail. He wanted to get the facts as well, so he moved closer and listened as she said that Miriam’s vital signs were good despite the loss of blood and that she was a very lucky young woman. The room fell quiet after that, and Clayton imagined the look Abigail was giving to Miriam, knowing luck had nothing at all to do with this.
He heard the nurse speak again, breaking the silence as she tried to reassure Abigail with the same words she had used for Miriam. “Your daughter and her husband will have plenty more children, Mrs. Beiler. You don’t need to worry about that.”
Then, with a swoosh of metal rungs along the steel rod, the nurse pushed away the curtain and exited the room, moving past Clayton in the hallway with an efficient nod, her attention already shifted to her next patient.
He stepped back into the room, but the sight of his wife and mother-in-law was blocked by the curtain, which the nurse hadn’t managed to slide fully out of the way. Not realizing he was there, Abigail spoke to her daughter.
“I’m glad you didn’t tell her the child wasn’t his. It’s none of her business.”
He froze.
“Why would I?” Miriam responded listlessly.
“Oh, Miriam,” Abigail said, and from the scrape of the chair, Clayton knew she was taking a seat next to the bed. “This is so awful. Here you went and married Clayton to save yourself from disgrace, and now that the child is gone, the entire marriage was for nothing.”
Abigail’s words stung, but the silence that followed—Miriam’s silence—cut him to the quick.
She didn’t defend their marriage. She didn’t say what a good husband he was or how well they were getting along or that affection for him was growing. She didn’t say a word.
Clayton turned and went back into the hall, nauseated. He slumped against the wall and sank to the floor.
The look he had seen in her eyes, the touches on his arm, the late nights talking, her body against his. He was certain she had begun to fall in love with him.
Had he been wrong all along?
Clayton became aware that Mamm was there in the hallway. Having returned from the cafeteria, she was now seated on a bench with her forehead resting on an upturned hand. A handkerchief was pressed into her palm, and her eyes were puffy and red.
“Oh, how I wish we could turn back the clock,” she said softly, more to herself than to him.
“You know that’s impossible,” he replied, and then he stood, intent on finding a quiet place to pour out his heart to God and remind Him that he did not want to turn back the clock. Not for a second did he want to turn it back, not if it meant Miriam would no longer be his.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Miriam was released from the hospital a few days later, in time for the funeral on Monday afternoon. As wit
h their wedding, the event was not done in the usual Amish way. Neither family had any desire to spread the word about the loss of the child, so there was no visitation period, no endless comings and goings of friends and neighbors taking over the chores, no gathering of Amish men to dig the grave. Instead, Miriam’s father had dug it himself alone in the Amish cemetery, not far from the still-bare mound where Clayton’s own father had been laid to rest just months before.
At the family’s request, the funeral was a private affair, attended by only seven people: Uriah Weaver and his wife, Norman and Abigail Beiler, Mamm, Miriam, and Clayton. Uriah handled the ceremonial portion of things, addressing the family for a while at the house and then saying the usual brief words graveside. As Clayton listened and attempted to comfort his grieving wife, all he could think about was how tiny the grave was, how very much it reminded him of the holes he had dug for the gazebo. As there would be no post-funeral meal, Uriah and Norman stayed behind at the cemetery to finish up there while Clayton took his wife and mother back home. Once at the house, Mamm went to the kitchen to start on supper, but Miriam headed straight to bed. Clayton spent the remainder of the afternoon at the closed shop, alternately praying and pouring his grief into the making of a new clock.
In the coming days, though Miriam rose and dressed each morning, she seemed overly tired. Clayton urged her to take it easy, reminding her that the doctor had told them both she had lost a tremendous amount of blood. She was also still mourning the death of her child, and likely would be for quite some time to come.
Eventually, she seemed to rally, at least somewhat. Two weeks after losing the baby, she began coming down to the clock shop again—not to work, but just to go through the mail and sit at her desk and stare off into space. She usually came near the end of the day so that she and Clayton could walk back up to the house together. As they did, sometimes she would reach out and take his hand, as if she could draw strength into her body from his. Occasionally, he still felt her crying at night, her silent sobs shaking the bed, but it was happening less and less.
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